VIII

NICE SICILIAN MURDERER

Tonino (always known as Nino) and Theresa were young Sicilian cousins who, in 1950, came to work for my Parents in Wales. It was Nino’s abounding energy that built much of the last half mile of driveway from the farmhouse to our house, without any machinery more sophisticated than a wheelbarrow, shovel and pickaxe – with only the strength of his limbs and the sweat of his brow. It was a Herculean task and the end result was still extremely rocky, wrecking the suspension of car after car. He carried coal, repaired things, and sometimes cooked dinner. He bought an old motorcycle and went home for a visit, carrying a Welsh farm cat with him. He came back again abruptly – apparently the fuss over his having killed one of his brothers in a rage had still not blown over. He played Sicilian love songs on his accordion and slicked back his black hair with olive oil – I worshipped him and nearly killed myself imitating his coiffure with water (in midwinter) – which resulted in pneumonia, of which more later.

Theresa was a skinny little peasant girl when she arrived. The first time we all sat down to eat together, she saw the large loaf of English white bread on the table and asked politely (in Sicilian Italian – in all the years she spent with us she never did learn to speak much English) how much of it she was allowed to eat. Bread was no longer rationed and indeed was probably subsidized by the Government, so Father said she could eat as much as she wished. From that moment on, she ate a loaf at each meal. Fortunately, she was an excellent seamstress and could let in darts of any spare cloth Mother could spare her, front and back to her dresses. They stood out like lightning flashes with their variegated colours and strange shapes to accommodate her broadening figure.

She was as strong as an ox, especially when there were young men looking on – swinging a full bale of straw onto her shoulder as if it were an elegant little evening handbag. Not for her: “This is so heavy, will you please help me?” She was raised to know that men wanted good, strong, hard workers as wives, not dainty wimps.

I used to try to teach her to read in English, starting with an illustrated children’s book called: Orlando, the Marmalade Cat. I seem to recall that progress was slow, but then, she probably did not read in Italian either.

The first time Theresa went home, she took a suitcase of practical work clothes, heavy wool stockings, shoes and boots. She was a hero. The next time she went home, she took a suitcase of nylons, heeled shoes, nylon dresses and make-up. Her father threw her out of the house. She was a hussy. After that, each time she went home, she knew what she had best take home, though, for herself, she continued to indulge in these new luxuries. Synthetic fibres were taking over the market in England as it struggled to recover from the ruinous war, but they took many more years to reach Theresa’s Sicily (and Spain, Greece and Yugoslavia, for that matter). But, by then, we (in England) were looking for 100 per cent cotton again!

Father’s lapses in his sketchy Italian became legendary: “Please put the dog in the oven and the horse in the colander.” (Instead of carne – ‘meat’ he said cane – ‘dog’, instead of cavalo – ‘cabbage’, he said cavallo – ‘horse’). Mother used her hands like an Italian and so got her point over more successfully.

When Nino used Father’s coracle to fish for flatfish (plaice), he would lie across the thwart with its broad leather strap for carrying the boat on one’s back. He would brandish a homemade spear of bamboo, with a nail in the end whose head he had removed and in which he had cut a notch to serve as a barb. In the thrill of the chase, he became overexcited and several times plunged the spear through the thin-skinned coracle, instead of the fish below. In view of his fratricidal history, Father was reluctant to let him use a gun, but I believe he relented and Tonino wasted many precious shells on harmless little birds: “Silly damn bird, I think he was a rabbit.” Indeed, he was using a 16 bore repeater shotgun with a five-cartridge magazine, so one can imagine how much was left of the little thrush, once the magazine was empty!

After a few years, first Nino, then Theresa, stopped coming back from their long visits home and settled down where they were happier: the Mezzogiorna or Land of the Midday Sun. Then my Parents took to having au pair girls or young men from Switzerland, Germany and France. Even distant cousins came from Bavaria (their father had been very much on the ‘other side’ during the war). Our distant French cousins (though poorer than the German branch) were much too grand to come as au pairs, so they came as guests. There was one occasion when Father had been left alone at home and told to meet a Swiss girl at the railway station. The arrangements had been made by Mother but she was off somewhere for a few weeks. He met the girl and brought her home. No sooner was he home again, than the Station Master called to say there were two or three more foreign ladies and he could not understand where they were supposed to be going. He presumed they must be ‘for us’.

Father drove back to the station and brought them all home, at least for the night. This occasioned his famous telegram to Mother: “CONTINENTAL DAMSELS ARRIVING ON EVERY TRAIN stop PLEASE STOP AT SOURCE OF SUPPLY”.

Twelve words, the minimum charge for a telegram. As it turned out, Mother had cancelled two, but they had not understood, and the third was supposed to be going to work on a farm. His French and German were much more proficient than his Italian and he soon managed to sort everything out, found homes for the two who had been refused and took the third to the farm where she was supposed to be working.

‘Old Mr Edwards’ was the tenant farmer of twelve poor acres on the north slope of the hill behind our house. It took him painfully long to limp the two hundred yards from his cottage to our house, bearing fresh milk and eggs in the morning. He had no milk cooler (how could he without electricity?), so the milk was still warm from the cows and the eggs from the hens. The milk would turn before teatime, so Father made cream cheese from it. He would hang a muslin bag of curds over the scullery sink, to drip its chalky water on the dishes. Mr Edwards spoke an imaginative English, in which ‘The Winkies’ were the lithe little weasels or stoats that lived in the dry-stone farm walls, while my sisters, when they goading their ponies to jump obstacles, he complained were: “Rushing and springing, springing and rushing, they are…” for he did not want his field chewed up by the hooves of the ponies, as they jumped their jumps. Progress had left the old man in its wake. The law required milk to be pasteurized and tuberculin-tested… he and his three old cows could not keep up. All four died, in what order, I do not know.

I still see him methodically scything six acres of hay each summer, by hand. A rhythmic slow swing of the great scythe, only interrupted to turn the hay upside down from time to time and, leaning on the crooked handle, sharpen the long, curved blade. Old Father Time. The grass cut, his one-legged son (a motorcycle accident, not the war) came for his ‘holiday’ to help his father turn the hay, sometimes piling it up on tepees of three posts, to keep it off the wet ground while it dried. Everyone prayed for a dry week (rare enough in Wales). Once dry enough, an ancient lorry would appear and they would cart it into his barn for the cows in winter. If stored damp, it would ferment, getting so hot it could burst into flames, consuming the year’s crop along with the barn. Richer farmers had insurance and some suspected their haystack fires, but Mr Edwards was his own insurance. He worked until he could work no more and then he died.

One year, there was to be an exceptionally high spring tide and my older siblings (and, no doubt, our Mother, who was always in favour of a dramatic ‘adventure’) suggested we should celebrate the occasion. Everyone we knew was invited and we posted announcements in village stores and post offices in the area. The Tern was anchored in front of the house, where she could be spot lit by the headlights of the old Jeep. A ‘pirate’ attack was enacted by rowing boats attacking the ‘Tern’. Father, wearing an Army-surplus snow camouflage suit (pure white) climbed to the masthead of the Tern illuminated by the Jeep, no mean feat for a man in his fifties and a boat only 25 feet long. I’ve done it myself more recently and the boat wobbles even in the flattest calm. I recall a Lord Somebody-or-other who slipped on the same rocks that I had fallen onto on my bicycle, and broke his hip, so the police were called to help carry him up on a stretcher. After that excitement, I suppose I conked out. I was still very young for late nights.

There was also the evening when we devised a ‘medieval’ dinner party. We were all dressed up in suitable costumes, the young men with thick socks whose toes were tied up to their calves like medieval shoes. Someone wanted to dress me in a little velvet suit with silver buttons so then they said I looked like some wimpish character I despised. I cried until Mother told me this was nonsense, I was to be called ‘Sir Firebrand’ and stop bawling! Straw was laid on the floor and we used no plates or forks, just thick slabs of bread onto which pieces of roast meat were served. Of course there were knives, much jesting, grandiose toasts, boasting and wild tales of great daring. The dogs, which had been strictly raised never to beg for food at the table, played their parts as hunting dogs quite pathetically. They were supposed to stay under the table on the straw and eat the bones we threw them once we had gnawed them ourselves. But they were so well behaved that they retired to a corner of the room and sat dribbling saliva onto the floor, their backs turned to us in shocked disdain at our uncivilised behaviour.

Another dinner was organised to celebrate the visit of an ‘Eastern Potentate’, actually a dark-skinned young actor who was staying. He was very good-looking and had huge brown soulful eyes. One guest was a somewhat overweight teenage girl, whom he took into a corner and was heard declaring his lust for more ‘well-covered virgins’ for his harem. She seemed so flattered by the compliment that it became quite embarrassing – especially when she afterwards refused to believe it was a hoax! That one was not quite so kind. Later the young actor set out to cross the estuary at low tide, wearing a cloak and carrying a sword – I remember him disappearing out of his depth in the wrong place in the channel, his sword still brandished above his head crying: “Excalibur”.

There was the time that the local foot Hunt was in our neighbourhood, because the farmers complained there were too many foxes. This was no elegant affair with the gentry on superb horses, all immaculately turned out – no, this was a foot pack (horses could never keep up in this rough terrain). The foxes never went to the summits of mountains, they knew they could be encircled up there, but following a hunt would often involve as much walking as it would take to scale half a dozen peaks. The technique was to watch the dogs from a vantage point and guess as to how best to cut them off. The day that the Hunt came to a neighbouring farm, Mother invited everyone to a high tea at the end. The hounds had been corralled into their trailer and there were quite few battered and muddy old Land Rovers parked in the field outside. As people worked their way through piles of sandwiches, eggs and ham and cake, there was a sudden uproar in the back yard by the coal shed. The hounds had succeeded in escaping from their trailer and had soon discovered a rubbish bin, which our own dogs were too polite to attack. In a matter of seconds, there was domestic rubbish spread across the countryside and the hounds were trying to rip each other apart, no doubt in their disappointment at the slim pickings in the rubbish. The Master of the Hounds was out in a trice, his ruddy face now puce with rage, as he bellowed and roared and lashed about with his whip. Finally, they were corralled once more, back in their trailer. I do not believe we even killed a fox that day, ‘kills’ were few and far between – but following the hounds was very energetic exercise and a good change to scaling mountains.

However, much of my school holidays (four months a year) were spent alone, dreaming. I would take the dogs Lanta, a black Labrador and one of my sisters’ dogs Iago, for long walks down the estuary and out onto the remote salt marshes near the sea. Lanta was named after Atlanta; for some reason, it had been decided that she was very vain. She was a rather stupid, good-natured pedigree while Iago was an intelligent mongrel cross between a collie and a terrier. He was a handsome smaller dog with fluffy white breeches, a black patch ‘saddle’ a bit askew, and a little brown around the eyes. The two of them would chase seagulls for miles, the gulls seemed to play with them by gliding along ten feet off the ground, never far ahead of the dogs. The dogs became frantic with the ‘hunt’ and ran and ran. They almost never wore collars and leashes and when they did, would pull incessantly, making them cough pathetically.

Lanta was a very strong swimmer and before I learned to swim she would pull me along in water far out of my depth. She swam only with her front paws and tail, swishing it to and from to add power – her hind legs neatly curled up like the retractable wheels on an aircraft. In those days, I would stay in the water for hours on end, until I was blue – hypothermia must have been close at hand for Mother to put me in the huge bathtub all alone in the afternoon. Lanta was also an excellent diver and could swim out and dive for a heavy bone we threw for her. She had the soft mouth of her breed and enjoyed carrying my sisters’ dolls around the house, never chewing on them but getting them thoroughly wet with her saliva. Diving nearly cost her her life: I took her out with a bone to dive for in mid-winter and, like me, she also caught pneumonia. I suppose there was no hot tub for her, when she got too cold. I really bonded with her as I nursed her back to health, feeding her by hand, mostly from my own plate.

Whenever Lanta was in heat, we kept her carefully locked up and sometimes tried to influence her choice of lovers with the introduction of a ‘suitable’ pedigree Labrador. That never worked. She always managed to escape and follow her heart to the wiry black Welsh sheep dogs so valued locally for their highly intelligent herding skills with sheep. Her offspring were much favoured by local poachers, who said her puppies were stronger than pedigree Labs. I never knew how Father came to do business with these disreputable hunters, but by the time Lanta had raised some fifty puppies, homes with poachers were running short.

I remember one old poacher particularly well for his collection of accidents, though he never got one of our puppies – Father said he was such a fool, he was bound to shoot the dog by mistake. This was not so far-fetched: he carried an old muzzle-loading shotgun that had to be loaded with a ramrod and did not use pre-packed cartridges. One day he could not remember whether or not he had loaded the gun, so he put the ramrod in to feel how far down it would go. It seemed to get a little stuck, so he gave the ramrod a smart tap with the palm of his hand. It was loaded and went off, shooting the ramrod right through his hand. When he had recovered, everyone hoped he would not be able to go shooting with only one hand, but not at all – he just became even more of a liability.

One day the fool crawled through a thick hedge, leaving his gun on the other side, then reaching back through the gap in the hedge, he grabbed the gun by its muzzle and started to pull it through after him. A twig caught on the trigger and he shot off his own shoulder… which finally put paid to his poaching days. After that we would see him sadly gimping along his old haunts, mercifully unarmed.

The hunting around us was so poor that the landowner only had one old gamekeeper nearby. Not only did I never see him out patrolling for poachers, I have no recollection of the man. I only remember his small cottage and always gave it a wide berth. I presume we were considered sufficiently ‘gentry’ to have permission to hunt there, but the really poor folk who desperately needed to hunt could be prosecuted for doing so on private property (as all the land was).

When any of us shot a rabbit, we gutted it at once, on the hillside. Otherwise, there was nowhere to throw out such offal and it would have to be taken down to the tide and fed to the seagulls. Mind you, it would have been much kinder to the remaining rabbits if we had thrown out the guts on the marsh, it was thoughtless of us to leave them in situ where they would be discovered by their relatives. When Father shot wild duck, he hung them by the neck from a tree, without gutting them. In theory, he said, he should leave them there until they fell to the ground with rot in the neck. That was called ‘hanging game’. In point of fact, every time one finally fell to the ground, it was already so full of maggots that there was no question of actually consuming it at table. I suspect that this was a medieval custom forced by the lack of refrigeration. In those days they used a very salty, spicy sauce called Garum, introduced by the Romans, to season and mask the taste of rotten meat. Garum still exists; its modern form is Nuoc Mam Pha San, the Vietnamese sauce made from the juice of rotted salt fish.